This is a competitive renewal of the rheumatology training program at Boston University School of Medicine. It experienced an unfortunate transition in the past cycle with the death of the PI, Dr. Joseph Kornin March 2005 after a long illness. Dr. David Felson, the prior Associate Director, assumed leadership of the grant after Dr. Korn's demise. Under Dr. Felson's leadership and the active involvement of faculty in rheumatology and other departments, the training program is vibrant, growing and actively training rheumatologists and others to enter academic careers in both clinical and bench laboratory research. All of those funded by this T32 in last 3-4 years have entered academic medicine, and most of them, in addition to or after their T32 support, have successfully competed for funding for their own career development grants. Even others in this training program not supported by the T32 have evidenced academic success with high rates of funding and other milestones of academic success. We have trained MD and PhD postdoctoral trainees, although most have been MD's. Given the small size of the rheumatology fellowship program (2 MD fellows per year all of whom are recruited with a research focus), we are not requesting an expansion of the postdoctoral training opportunities, in part to limit T32 trainees to our most competitive. There is a prominent clinical research component to this training grant with at least half of fellows pursuing clinical research track that includes taking courses toward a degree in our School of Public Health and participation in our K30program (CREST program). Among unique elements of our training program are the recent inclusions of doctoral trained physical therapists as postdoctoral clinical research trainees. We hope to continue to train a few physical therapists especially in the clinical research track. Also, we take advantage of the breadth of bench laboratory experience and excellence at Boston University to permit our trainees interested in a bench to train with outstanding scientists doing work of relevance to rheumatic diseases.
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